What language did Jesus speak?
It is widely believed that Jesus’ everyday language was Aramaic. Jews learned this language during their Babylonian captivity. Ancient inscriptions in Aramaic have been found over a vast area extending from Egypt to China. The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible tells us, The dialect daily spoken by Jesus and the disciples was Galilean Aramaic, which, as is noted in Matt. 26:73, was recognizably different from the southern dialect spoken in and around Jerusalem. It was in this same Galilean dialect that the Aramaic of the Palestinian Talmud and the older Midrashim was written” (article Aramaic, Vol. 1, p. 186). Some scholars claim that Greek was the common language of Jesus day. It hard to be absolutely certain about what was the common tongue of an ancient civilization. The writings that archeologists find may not represent what was normally used by the common man.
This week we leave the Culture Wars behind and return to some basic apologetics…well, some interesting information about the Scriptures that informs our apologetics. I once had a discussion with a person who insisted that Our Divine Lord spoke only Hebrew. The conversation had begun centered around the word “rock” in St Matthew’s Gospel (Mt 16:18), but quickly devolved into a debate about ancient languages. My friend held that the word “rock” couldn’t possibly refer to St. Peter because the Gospel was written in Greek, and the Greek words used in that passage are “petros” and “petra,” which mean “rock” and “small rock,” respectively. I pointed out that Jesus didn’t speak Greek, He spoke Aramaic, and the Aramaic word for rock is “kepha,” which means “big rock” or “boulder.” My friend was thunderstruck, he had never considered that a Jew in that time would speak any other language but Hebrew. By the time Christ arrived on the scene, the Jewish people had been through a series of calamiti
